Pietro da cortana biography of michael

Along with his contemporaries and rivals Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini , he was one of the key figures in the emergence of Roman Baroque architecture. He was also an important designer of interior decorations. He was born Pietro Berrettini , but is primarily known by the name of his native town of Cortona in Tuscany. He is best known for his frescoed ceilings such as the vault of the salone or main salon of the Palazzo Barberini in Rome and carried out extensive painting and decorative schemes for the Medici family in Florence and for the Oratorian fathers at the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome.

He also painted numerous canvases. Only a limited number of his architectural projects were built but nonetheless they are as distinctive and as inventive as those of his rivals. Berrettini was born into a family of artisans and masons, [ 4 ] in Cortona , then a town in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. He was involved in fresco decorations at the Palazzo Mattei in under the direction of Agostino Ciampelli and Cardinal Orsini had commissioned from him an Adoration of the Shepherds c.

Allegory of divine providence and barberini power

In Rome, he had encouragement from many prominent patrons. According to Cortona's biographers [ 5 ] his gifted copy of Raphael 's Galatea fresco [ 6 ] brought him to the attention of Marcello Sacchetti [ sv ] , papal treasurer during the papacy of Pope Urban VIII. Such contacts helped him gain an early major commission in Rome — , a fresco decoration in the church of Santa Bibiana that was being renovated under the direction of Bernini.

In the Sacchetti orbit, he met Pope Urban VIII and Cardinal Francesco Barberini , the papal nephew, and their patronage of Cortona provided him with ample scope to demonstrate his abilities as a painter of frescoes and canvases. Fresco cycles were numerous in Cortona's Rome; many represented "quadri riportati" or painted framed episodes imitating canvases as found in the Sistine Chapel ceiling or in Annibale Carracci 's The Loves of the Gods in the Palazzo Farnese gallery completed Following the architecture of the room, he created the painted illusion of an open airy architectural framework against which figures are situated, usually seen 'al di sotto in su ' apparently coming into the room itself or floating far above it.

The ornamented architectural framework essentially forms five compartments.